Today-in-History: Swapped at birth – The bizarre story of McDan

According to him, he was born light-skinned, and with his mother being dark in complexion, the nurses took him to another mother and gave his mother a dark baby.

“…Their findings after these series of checks and comparisons gave credence to my mother’s argument. The natural resemblances among my siblings and me were so overwhelming that everyone could not raise any objection after they had seen them. Many of my siblings were light-skinned just like me. It was only a matter of ironic coincidence that the other woman, light-skinned as she was, would give birth to a dark-skinned son, while my mother had a light-skinned baby even though she was dark,” he wrote.

Read the full story originally published on July 8, 2023 by www.ghanaweb.com.

This story may sound familiar to a lot of people who were, especially, born in some rural parts of Ghana, and even elsewhere in the world, because it is not new.

But in his book, ‘The Path of An Eagle; Despair, Hope & Glory,’ Dr Daniel McKorley, the Chief Executive Officer of the McDan Group, narrated how his mother had a bizarre experienced with him at childbirth.

In the chapter titled, Swapped At Birth, McDan said that had it not been for his mother’s peculiar vigilance, he would have ended with up with a wrong identity in life.

According to him, his family was so poor, it even reflected in how in the greater parts of his growing up years, he wrongly celebrated his birthdays in a month that was not originally when he was born.

“My childhood years saw some bizarre circumstances one of which nearly led to me finding myself with a wrong mother. From the stories my mother told me, I was born in La, where we lived at the time. As I have recounted already, my family was saddled with many unsurmountable problems, the greatest being poverty, and my mother, with her numerous births, was tipped to become the most vulnerable.

“I was born on June 16, 1971, even though, growing up, I had always known July 16, 1971 as my birthday. That was the date on my Immunisation/ Weighing card too, so it was not too clear how the error occurred. It is guessed that a mistake might have been made at my place of birth and given the illiteracy of my mother, this error persisted unchecked for a while. Typically, many assumed that my mother might have given birth to me at home, assisted by some traditional midwives, as was common practice in those days, and she, unable to remember the exact day of her delivery, gave a wrong date to the hospital where she later attended her postnatal sessions. That was not the case, however, for I was born at no mean a place than the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital, where there were supposed to be highly qualified doctors and nurses and midwives in attendance. The reason why I got my date of birth wrong on my Immunisation/ Weighing card from the beginning therefore remains a mystery up to today.

“I got to know my true date of birth when I was about 16. Cleaning our room one afternoon, I found my birth certificate stuck among the pages of an old book hidden in an old wooden box. I took time to read the writings on it and found the actual date and place of my birth- June 16, 1971 at the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital. I could not believe that for all those 16 years, I had been celebrating my birthday on a wrong date. Later, I asked my parents and both of them could not give me any satisfactory reason why that error occurred,” he wrote in his book.

Dr. Daniel McKorley continued his narration by recounting how he was nearly swapped at birth.

He said that when he was born, considering how light-skinned he was, and with his mother not being as fair in complexion, the nurses decided to take him to another new mother while another baby was brought to her.

But his mother, he added, knew there was always something unique about her children and so with that unique observing instinct, and having earlier had children, she insisted that she had been handed the wrong child.

It turned out she was right, although the nurses refused to accept that they had made a big blunder.

“A wrong date on my Immunisation/ Weighing card was not the only blunder surrounding my birth. Another inauspicious sign of the tough life awaiting me showed right after my birth when a nurse mistakenly gave me to another woman who had also given birth at about the same time as my mother. According to my mother, I was very light skinned at birth, and the attendant nurses, judging from my mother’s dark complexion, ruled out the possibility of her being my mother. In their confusion, after they had cleaned me up, they took me to the other woman whose complexion they thought matched mine and gave her dark-skinned baby to my mother.

“Being naturally very observant, however, my mother promptly noticed the mishap and drew the attention of the senior midwives to it. Already, she had observed some peculiar features that enabled her to identify her children easily and she had done same with me. My mother could make out her progenies just by scanning their foreheads or examining their fingernails. The nurses would not easily admit that they were careless on that occasion, and as DNA testing was not available in those days, it had to take moments of wild arguments, followed by a series of blood checks plus an ‘inspection’ of my siblings to arrive at the truth.

“Their findings after these series of checks and comparisons gave credence to my mother’s argument. The natural resemblances among my siblings and me were so overwhelming that everyone could not raise any objection after they had seen them. Many of my siblings were light-skinned just like me. It was only a matter of ironic coincidence that the other woman, light-skinned as she was, would give birth to a dark-skinned son, while my mother had a light-skinned baby even though she was dark,” he wrote.